Easily Sort The People You Follow On Twitter Into Lists With Formulists

Back when Twitter first introduced Lists as a feature, I thought it was a great idea. I started adding everybody I followed to a specific list, which made it easier to follow all their tweets in one of my Twitter clients. One thing I always wondered however, was how they could make this feature better.

Then I stumbled upon Formulists and realized that this type of project was already underway. Formulists helps you organize groups of people on Twitter into smart, auto-updating Twitter lists. Imagine creating great lists and not ever having to update them by hand.

What Is Formulists?

Formulists is a list creation and management tool that allows users to effortlessly generate dynamic and personalized Twitter lists that continuously self-update.

Formulists (directory listing) offers a broad range of stock lists that can help users both manage and expand their Twitter network. When you sign up for Formulists, you will have the option to choose one or more of these stock lists, or to form a “custom list” that allows you to combine or filter existing Twitter lists you’ve created.

Furthermore, lists generated with Formulists can be viewed or deleted from any Twitter client and will continue to self-update without the need to return to Formulists to do it.

What Types of Lists Can I Create?

As I mentioned, there are a lot of great stock lists in Formulists. You can filter and sort your followers, and network with people based on location, keywords in their Bio, twitter activity, number of followers, and more.

Here are some examples of the lists you can create in Formulists:

The Filter My Following list is a simple way to quickly filter your timeline into groups that you care about. You can filter the people you follow based on all the things I mentioned above, like keywords, location, etc. You can also use advanced filters with multiple keywords and search operators (e.g. OR, AND).

Filter your following into lists of people from the same city as you, your followers who have the biggest following, techies, etc.

The Expand Your Network lists help you find the type of people you’re looking for because you can choose how you want to find them. Stick with the default settings or use your own filters to get different results.

Other great stock lists include Recently Followed Me, Recently Unfollowed Me, and People I Talk To.

How Do I Start Creating Lists?

To quickly see how Formulists works, check out this short YouTube video:

Conclusion

As soon as I got on Formulists, I instantly realized why everybody was using it. Creating lists like Who My Friends Talk To and People Like Me are not something you could genuinely pull off by hand, and the ability to dynamically generate them saves you a lot of time. In my opinion, Formulists will help make your time on Twitter more useful.

One thing to note is because Formulists is still technically in beta, they only let so many people sign up per day (around 50). This is expected to go up as they “ramp up” their system, but until then everyone who signs up is given 5 invites. Feel free to tweet these out to your followers or post them in the comments below.

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Chuck Baggett

February 14, 2011

I feel like I’m missing something extremely basic, but I don’t see any way to see tweets only from people who follow me. I can see how to see a list of people that I folllow but who don’t follow me, but no way to automatically make a list or otherwise filter tweets so as to see tweets only from people that follow me.